Common Carotid Artery Diameter and Risk of Cardiovascular Events and Mortality: Pooled Analyses of Four Cohort Studies.

Carotid arterial diameter enlargement is a manifestation of arterial remodeling and may be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD). We evaluated the association between carotid artery diameter and risk of stroke, coronary heart disease, CVD, and all-cause mortality and explored whether the associations could be explained by processes involved in arterial remodeling, that is, blood pressure-related media thickening, arterial stiffness, arterial wall stress, and atherosclerosis. We included 4887 participants (mean age 67±9 years; 54% women) from 4 cohort studies: Rotterdam Study, NEPHROTEST, Hoorn Study, and a study by Blacher et al.

Carotid stiffness is associated with incident stroke: a systematic review and individual participant data meta-analysis.

Background: Carotid stiffening is considered a key element in the pathogenesis of stroke. However, results of studies evaluating the association between carotid stiffness and incident stroke have been inconsistent.

Objectives: This study investigated whether carotid stiffness (as determined by ultrasonography) is associated with incident stroke and whether this association is independent of aortic stiffness as estimated by carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV).

Contribution of Rare and Common Genetic Variants to Plasma Lipid Levels and Carotid Stiffness and Geometry: A Substudy of the Paris Prospective Study 3.

Background: We assess the contribution of common and rare putatively functional genetic variants (most of them coding) present on the Illumina exome Beadchip to the variability of plasma lipids and stiffness of the common carotid artery.

Methods And Results: Measurements were obtained from 2283 men and 1398 women, and after filtering and exclusion of monomorphic variants, 32,827 common (minor allele frequency >0.01) and 68,770 rare variants were analyzed.

Impact of country of birth on progression of steady and pulsatile hemodynamic parameters in normotensive and hypertensive subjects.

The impact of country of birth (Africa, Asia, or France) on variations of hemodynamic, clinical, and biological parameters of a French general population was evaluated. The study included 2743 subjects (1641 men, 1102 women; mean age 45.4 ± 13.

The impact of the metabolic syndrome--but not of hypertension--on all-cause mortality disappears in the elderly.

Objective: The metabolic syndrome predicts the risk of cardiovascular and all-cause death, but its clinical relevance in the elderly remains debatable. We aimed to determine the impact of the metabolic syndrome on all-cause mortality according to age, in comparison with hypertension alone.

Methods: We studied 129 655 participants (82 110 men and 47 545 women) undergoing a standard health check-up at the Investigations Préventives et Cliniques center (Paris, France).

All-cause and cardiovascular mortality using the different definitions of metabolic syndrome.

The aim of the present study was to assess the risk of all-cause and cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality in subjects identified as having metabolic syndrome (MS) using either the recent International Diabetes Federation (IDF) definition or the revised National Cholesterol Educational Program (NCEP-R) definition, but not the original NCEP (2001) definition. The study population was composed of 84,730 men and women without CVD aged > or =40 years who had a health checkup at the IPC Center. Follow-up for mortality was 4.